Quick Gameplay Thoughts: March 3 part II

Hey all,

More stuff on our minds here, now on the actual 3rd of March. I've been pretty happy with how this style of post has been going so far, so going to stick with it for a while at least. Around 3 posts a week seems to be about right at present in terms of how much we've got to talk about so should be able to expect that sort of cadence for now. Imagine that'll spike up and down a bit during some periods (e.g. around mid-season). As a reminder since I work primarily with the gameplay teams these posts will mainly talk about gameplay stuff, so a lot of the time I won't be able to speak in an informed manner about other non core gameplay stuff like skins, matchmaking, rotating game modes, Esports rules etc.

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Older champ polish passes

We've got some small sets of non power impacting changes coming to a few older champs in 7.5. Those are changes designed to give some improvements to how a champion with older art feels to play by better synching up some of their animations and visual effects with the actions being performed. That's something we put quite a bit of time into doing with new champs, so we figured it'd probably be valuable to do a pass on older champs and see what wasn't quite lined up right back in the day.

Quick version of what that'll look like in 7.5 (more details to come in the patch notes):

• Jax - Better sync between attack animations and actual impacts, attack sequence for the ult, some E clarity
• Cho - Better match between W spell effect area and actual area affected.
• Nocturne - E tether range indicator for Nocturne, R slight animation adjustments.

A lot of the other older champs we've looked at so far didn't have much we could adjust in this way. We expect we'll find at least a few more similar cases to hit though, so should get a bit more like this into upcoming patches too.

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Tooltip Tweaks

We've got a few tweaks to tooltip color and format going out in patch 7.5. Please do let us know how those feel once you've had a bit of time with them, we're interested in tweaking them further. Longer term we'd like to do a bigger tooltip overhaul too, when's unclear however (people that would do that are working on other stuff for a while). For now though we're looking for ways to polish the current ones so they're in a better state.

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Some possible 7.6 balance targets

• Morgana - Potential small buffs.
• Shen - Likely nerf target. Tough case because he's out of line specifically for organized teams (not just in pro, though that's the most visible case of course). Currently looking at pulling power out of his ult which is where the difference in effectiveness for those different contexts lies with ongoing discussion as to what changes we could make to make him closer to balanced for both solo queue and organized teams at the same time.
• Quinn - Potentially still too strong after the Edge of Night and Ghostblade nerfs in 7.4. If that doesn't look like the case closer to ship might go for some power neutral changes instead. Aiming to make her gank pattern a bit more interactive regardless.
• Cho'gath - Might need buffs. We've seen a number of struggling Cho'gaths after the 7.5 changes, having said that though his play rates shot up massively, so a lot of that could just be people unfamiliar with Cho and people experimenting with different builds given the changes. We're prepping some buffs should they be needed, might pull back on them if appropriate though.
• Lissandra - Is struggling a bit at present, and should do ok in a meta with a decent number of assassins played. Looking at possible buffs as a result, with the secondary goal of making her passive more satisfying.